Taccuino di Ellie

Ellie’s notebook is both a practical restraint and a record of temptation. Its repeated prohibitions help her resist biting Corey Allen, but the game she builds around them also makes her increasingly attentive to where he is, when he is alone, and where an unnoticed bite might be possible. The notebook measures restraint while documenting the conditions that make restraint difficult.

The notebook as a check on fantasy

Later that night, with sweat drying on her body and the sheets twisted around her legs, Ellie makes herself return to the living room to retrieve the notebook. She insists to herself that fantasies are only fantasies, but that keeping at least one foot on the ground matters. Back in bed, she opens the notebook and rewrites a heading: reasons not to bite Corey Allen. Beneath it she writes the same prohibition four times. The list offers no explanation or argument; repetition is its method, turning a bare rule into something she can consult when desire presses.

The notebook carries this private rule into the office. Ellie hides it at the bottom of her desk drawer and returns to it whenever the urge to bite Corey becomes too insistent. Its movement between bedroom and workplace gives it two connected functions: it records an intimate struggle, then becomes a tool Ellie can reach for amid the ordinary spaces where that struggle is tested. It does not make the desire disappear; it gives her a procedure for acting against it.

Occasioni and the arithmetic of restraint

Ellie invents a game called Occasioni. She will not bite Corey, despite wanting to, and considers herself deserving of some trust on that point. Whenever she encounters a situation in which she could bite him but refrains, she awards herself a point. In the notebook she marks the place and time beside a star. Passing him on a deserted staircase counts; noticing that he has gone into the bathroom without immediately locking the door counts; seeing him head alone to the photocopy room after everyone else has left counts too.

The examples make the scoring system revealingly double-edged. Every point confirms that Ellie did not act, yet each entry also preserves a location, a circumstance, and a possible opening. After reaching ten points, she takes herself out for ice cream. While eating it, she allows herself to imagine biting Corey as much as she likes. The reward therefore does not end the fantasy; it separates imagined indulgence from the action she is trying to avoid, while leaving both attached to the same record.

What the record reveals

After a couple of weeks, Ellie notices a pattern in the Occasioni entries. At first the opportunities are scarce; they increase as she learns Corey’s schedule and identifies the best places in the office to bite someone unseen. By mid-December, however, the number falls sharply. Corey’s hours have become unpredictable, and the places Ellie had identified as optimal are seldom empty. The notebook has become a dataset from which she can see not only how often she resists, but how her knowledge of Corey’s movements changes the number of occasions she recognizes.

It takes Ellie some time to identify who is usually present in those supposedly ideal locations: Michelle from accounting, who is married. That discovery redirects the record’s attention from empty rooms and Corey’s schedule to another person’s presence. The detail also sharpens the unease of Ellie’s method: her tally is not an abstract count of self-control, but a map of workplace situations and the people who occupy them.

From game to test

By the company’s pre-Christmas party, Occasioni has stopped being much fun. Ellie no longer wants merely to imagine biting Corey; she wants to do it, and being unable to frustrates her. At one point she tells herself to go home because she is drunk, puts down her empty glass, and goes to wash her face. When she comes out, Corey is alone in the empty corridor. The situation fits the kind of opportunity the notebook’s game has trained her to notice: Ellie calls it a golden Occasioni and recognizes that, if she does not want to do something she will regret, she needs to leave.

The notebook’s significance lies in that tension between record and rehearsal. Its list supplies a rule, and its points register occasions when Ellie follows it; at the same time, logging the time, place, and availability of an unwitnessed encounter keeps the forbidden act sharply in view. At the party, the game’s language does not settle the conflict for her. It names the choice at the moment when restraint becomes hardest.